Experimental Evaluation of the Impact of Lived Experience and Personal Story on Neuroscience Knowledge Translation Effectiveness: Sharing the Neuroscience of ADHD with Pre‐Service Teachers

Abstract

Previous work suggested that sharing personal stories is effective for knowledge translation (KT) of the neuroscience of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for a teacher audience. In the current study, we experimentally evaluated the impact of personal story and lived experience on a similar KT activity. We measured knowledge and attitudes about ADHD before and after our KT activity and used a factorial design to evaluate the impact of personal story (personalized versus depersonalized) and lived experience (presenter with versus without an ADHD diagnosis) with N = 14 to 24 per group. The presenter without an ADHD diagnosis was a neuroscience expert. All conditions were associated with increased attribution of ADHD symptoms to the brain. Speaker quality ratings were high, especially in the personalized + ADHD diagnosis condition and the depersonalized + no ADHD diagnosis condition. While incorporating lived experience is important for authentic KT, we demonstrated that the KT presenter themselves need not have lived experience to change pre‐service teacher attitudes and beliefs. More work is needed to address the potential impacts of neuroscience expertise and other aspects of the presenters in our study.